Thank you very much for your interest Hans, I would greatly appreciate any additional feedback you have for this as I'm keenly aware of your efforts in the rental functionality.
Comments inline --- Hans Bakker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi Chris, > > i have read your and davids discussion on this > subject. > Inventory for rental items is currently organized on > the fixed asset where the > number of rental items available can be maintained > on a date level together > with a maximum per time period. > > You want to connect this with the inventory of > products and be able to order > products when there are not enough fixed assets to > rent. > Not only be concerned about low/no inventory levels, but these rental agreements are open ended. While I like the calendar approach for the hotel industry, it has no benefit over what a status change datetime does in my industry. For maximum time period dependent transactions calendars are indeed the way to go. > The problem here is the availability by date. This > is only done on the fixed > asset level but not in the product inventory. The InventoryItem.statusId field is essentially a denormalized field to show the most recent InventoryStatus.statusId. So availability is pretty straight forward for my implementation by basing it on status. As far as handling the hotel scenario consistantly with my small item rental scenario, I think an indicator or additional InventoryItemType would work well. > Is > perhaps the movement between > inventory items and fixed assets an option? That > means some items are for > rental (= fixed asset) and same are for sale > (inventory) > The problem I have with this approach is that all of the great and wonderful (and ever changing) services that regulate the movement and location of InventoryItems end up being duplicated to work with with FixedAssets. These will no doubt end up out of sync and events will be inconsistant due to the update of one set of services and not the other. This is really unncessesary as there is no difference in the shipment or transfer of a rental item from a sale item. The rental item is simply more likely to be returned. The other issue I have with FixedAssets being manipulated for Order fullfilment is modularization. Since the FixedAsset entity is firmly an accounting entity, rental and order fullfillment ideally "should" be able to "work" without the accounting component even being loaded. That can't be done if order fullfillment is dependent on the accounting component. > You could also consider when a rental request is > made and there are no rental > items available, that a 'sale' request is made from > inventory to the fixed > asset? Then if inventory is not enough, a purchase > order can be generated. > > please let me know what you think. > > I have no doubt that that could work, however it seems fragile for two reasons. One, I don't think that kind of work around would make it back into the project so I'd be fearful that updates would break it quite easily. And two, it's not intuitive or acurately describing what is occuring. So then my employer is dependent on someone knowing the intricacies of what should be a common service. Which is great for the demand of my services, but coding for inventory management isn't interesting work for me :) Thanks Hans! > Regards, > Hans Bakker > ANT Websystems Co.,Ltd > (http://www.antwebsystems.com) > > If you want to verify that this message really > originates from > from the above person, download the public key from: > http://www.antwebsystems.com/hbakkerAntwebsystems.asc > >
